or: Lyric mistakes in French, English and Creole – I’m trilingual!

Listening to music of a new language is one way to make learning that language more fun and a bit easier too, especially if you repeatedly listen to the same tunes.

I’ve been doing this for a while though am in no way confident to belt out a rendition of most of what I hear. In fairness, I also struggle doing that in English too if other people are around since no-one needs their ear drums burst on account of my tone deaf singing voice!

That aside, I am trying and I do know a few bits of a few songs now.

I’m plagued by another challenge which I also have with English language songs too. This is a phenomenon called mondegreen for those of you who are interested in improving your English language knowledge too. Anyway, this is when you mishear or misinterpret a word or phrase and it happens a lot with songs. I’m sure you can all think of at least a few songs you sang a particular way and then found out the lyrics were entirely different. If you haven’t, then it’s a fair bet you’ve never sung in the shower either!

I mostly listen to French and Creole music in the car. If I’ve heard a song somewhere else that I like the sound of, I Shazam it and upload it to Spotify so I can play it in our car too (ahhh technology). This is how I found Lady Melody by Tom Frager.

This is a very happy sounding tune and it’s quite catchy.

We were going for an afternoon drive earlier this week and this song came on. I asked “what is he saying about finding the rubbish bin?”

After listening some more until the chorus came around again (song structures seem to follow a fairly universal standard) and I was told “nothing.” Apparently he’s singing that he finds this woman very beautiful.

I started to laugh given this is almost the exact opposite meaning to what I had thought!

Unless it’s a designer rubbish bin…

The word for rubbish bin is “poubelle” which is pronounced “poo bell.”

The words for very beautiful are “plus belle” which is pronounced “plew bell.”

I may continue to sing for the designer rubbish bin.

It will always make me smile!

Thanks to Britney Spears for the title to this post. For an indication of how old this song is, her website is selling a 20th Anniversary Collection based on this tune!

Bonus: For a laugh, here are The 40 Song Lyrics We’ve Been Messing Up This Whole Time – I’ve done a few of these!